Sarah Sanders and John Kelly confer at the White House on Tuesday.
Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images

The White House on Tuesday stood by chief of staff John Kelly’s defense of Confederate monuments and his assertion that a failure to compromise led to the American civil war.

In an interview with Laura Ingraham on Monday night, Kelly suggested that both the Union and the Confederacy acted in “good faith” and “made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand”.

His remarks reignited the debate over Confederate monuments fueled by his boss, Donald Trump, who earlier this year blamed “both sides” in the wake of deadly violence during a white nationalist protest against the removal of a statue of Robert E Lee.

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The comments drew immediate backlash, as many observers noted that the matter the north and south couldn’t compromise on was slavery. Southern states began to secede after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Although Lincoln did not favor the abolition of slavery, southerners found his support for limiting the institution to the states and territories where it already existed to be unconscionable.

“Notion that civil war resulted from a lack of compromise is belied by all the compromises made on enslavement from America’s founding,” said Ta-Nehisi Coates, a prominent intellectual and author who has written extensively about race in the United States.

“I mean, like, it’s called the three-fifths compromise for a reason,” he added, referring to provision in article 1, section 2 that provided that for purposes of representation in Congress, slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person. “But it doesn’t stand alone. Missouri Compromise. Kansas-Nebraska Act.”

On Tuesday, the press secretary, Sarah Sanders accused the media of falsely perpetuating a narrative that the White House is “racially charged and divided”.

“Because you don’t like history doesn’t mean you can erase it and pretend it didn’t happen,” she said during the press briefing. “And I think that’s the point that General Kelly was trying to make. To try to create something and push a narrative that simply doesn’t exist is just frankly outrageous and absurd.”

Instead she blamed Democratic-leaning groups such as the organization behind a controversial opposition advertisement in the Virginia gubernatorial race for “stoking political racism”. In the ad, minority children are intimidated by a white man driving in truck with a Confederate flag and a bumper sticker supporting the Republican in the race.

Sanders also claimed there is “historical documentation” to support Kelly’s claim that an inability to compromise was a cause of the bloodiest conflict in American history.

“There’s a pretty strong consensus from people from the left, the right, the north, and the south that believe that if some of the individuals engaged had been willing to come to some compromises on different things, then it may not have occurred,” she said.

Pressed on Kelly’s comments, she expressed exasperation with reporters: “I’m not going to get up here and relitigate the civil war.”

Trump’s predecessor in the White House, Ulysses S Grant, described the southern cause as “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse”. Grant was a Union general during the war and rose to command the United States army.

Kelly’s comments echoed those made by Donald Trump in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, when a white supremacist drove his car into counter-protesters, leaving one woman dead and several others injured. The president sparked controversy in the days that followed by blaming violence “on both sides”, appearing to put neo-Nazis and white supremacists on equal footing with demonstrators from the left.

Quick guide

What happened at the Charlottesville protests?

What happened in Charlottesville on 12 August?

White nationalists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest against a plan to remove a statue of Robert E Lee, the Confederacy’s top general in the American civil war.

Demonstrators chanted racist statements, carried antisemitic placards and held torches during the “Unite the Right” rally, which was organised by white nationalist Jason Kessler.

The march was met by anti-fascist demonstrators, and some skirmishes broke out before James Fields, 20, allegedly ploughed a car into a group of counter-demonstrators.

Civil rights activist Heather Heyer, 32, died and others were injured. Fields has been charged with murder.

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White supremacist protesters have sought to use Lee as a symbol of their movement, while government officials across the country have called for dozens of Confederate-linked monuments to be removed from public grounds.

Kelly, a retired general who was named Trump’s chief of staff in August, argued it was “dangerous” to take down historical markers simply because they were being viewed in a different light.

“It shows you … a lack of appreciation of history and what history is,” Kelly said.

By framing the civil war as an issue of states’ rights, Kelly perpetuated a popular claim on the right that downplays the role of slavery as central to the conflict. But while declaring their right to secede from the Federal Union, delegates from Confederate states cited the future of slavery as fundamental to their cause.

Delegates in South Carolina referred to “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” in their secession declaration, while Mississippi proclaimed in its own secession declaration that slavery was “the greatest material interest of the world”.

And while there was little doubt that President Abraham Lincoln was morally opposed to slavery, he initially pursued a centrist approach toward slaveholders in the south and their opponents in the north. Lincoln did, however, campaign vigorously against the expansion of slavery into new states and territories.

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Kelly did not say in his interview with Fox News what compromise would have been feasible to prevent the civil war.

During his appearance, Kelly also declined to walk back his attacks on Representative Frederica Wilson, a Democratic congresswoman who made public details of Trump’s phone call with the widow of a US soldier killed in the ambush in Niger.

Kelly sharply criticized Wilson at a White House press briefing earlier this month as an “empty barrel” and falsely stated the congresswoman had bragged in a speech he attended about securing funding for a building dedicated to two fallen FBI agents. Video footage of Wilson’s speech showed she did not make comments matching Kelly’s characterization.

Asked by Ingraham if he felt the need to apologize, Kelly said he would “never” do so.

“Well, I’ll apologize if I need to. But for something like that, absolutely not,” he said. “I stand by my comments.”